The Fairy Godmother Fashion Renaissance

In the late twentieth century, fairy godmothers of North America staged a comeback. Maybe you didn’t believe they existed, or maybe you thought they were all in Europe–a lot of people do. The simple truth is that they had not been seen for over a century, since the world-wide strike after the Grimm brothers wrote them out of Cinderella. By that time, the Pied Piper had absconded with all of the mice, so it was hard to find good help. Cats weren’t cooperative about driving the pumpkins and even less so about being turned into magical horses. And real horses were… well…cattle. Seamstresses wanted to be paid by the hour, and there were far too many ball gowns to be made in far too little time. Besides, what do fairies know about money?

So, the fairy godmothers magicked up some glass crypts, fluffed them with silk pillows and thousand-count sheets, and settled down for a long nap. They left one FG on call each decade, because even on strike, no fairy godmother could ignore a slipper-related emergency. All was going fine until the 1930s when there was a precipitous drop in the number of fancy dress balls. Bippity, the FG on call at the time, swears it wasn’t her fault, but she was known to be a maverick, so the others didn’t fully buy her Depression-era excuses. When Boppity took over in the 1940s, she was appalled to see women wearing trousers, but she was too much distracted by swing dancing to do anything about it. By the 1950s and 60s, the style detour was fully embraced, so Boo would have let the fairy world sleep on, if it weren’t for the heaven of crinoline. She woke all the FGs to partake in the joy.

It was a fleeting joy, however. Because at the end of the decade, the godmothers were fully alert to witness the worst crime against fashion that history had ever seen – Woodstock. Why, it was hard to tell the men from the women: they dressed alike, they were hairy in all the wrong places, and no one could seem to dance at all. Whatever were the FGs to do?

In the past, the fairies had raised babies from their infancy to right the wrongs of the people, but there just wasn’t time. So they searched the land for an ingénue. They found a 20-year-old girl who had been trained in grace and graced with style and devoted all of their fairy essence to creating a legend who would resurrect the glory of fabric and lace. The girl’s name? Vera Wang.